


Twice to be Certain

by Jaydee_Faire



Category: Final Fantasy Tactics
Genre: Bitterness, Blood, Gen, Gore, M/M, Unrequited Love, Violence, Vomiting, Zombification, canon character death, decomposition, graphic gore, this fic is gross
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-05
Updated: 2020-09-05
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:47:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26298130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jaydee_Faire/pseuds/Jaydee_Faire
Summary: Argath falls at Ziekden, and wakes again at home.
Relationships: Ramza Beoulve/Argath Thadalfus
Comments: 5
Kudos: 7





	Twice to be Certain

**Author's Note:**

  * For [atramento](https://archiveofourown.org/users/atramento/gifts).



> As per the tags, this fic is very gross. It deals with a bunch of nasty stuff coming out of a dead body. You were warned.

He lay on his side, breathing shallowly to keep the pain away. If he moved, he would gasp, and his chest would shudder and his breath would stink of copper, and the pain would grip him and make him scream.

He was a man. A soldier. His father’s son and his mother’s child. He would not scream.

Ice was crackling on his back, each snowflake that drifted down to land on his cheek a tiny, tickling chill that was beginning to spread across his skin. Beneath him, blood and slush soaked into his clothes; his hand was trapped underneath his body and if he moved his fingers, he could feel torn fabric and the fleshy edge of the wound Delita had made in him.

He had done what he’d been ordered to do. He had played his part, and well. Zalbaag would carry his honor and praises back to his mother in Limberry, and the sins soiling house Thadalfus would finally be wiped clean.

It brought a bit of peace to him, and he closed his eyes as an explosion shook the ground and silenced the world.

*

Argath opened his mouth to gasp and gagged on the grit coating his tongue. He tried to sit up, coughing, but could only manage to roll onto one side. He tilted his head, mouth open; his lips were deeply cracked and stung as he lifted shaking fingers to dig the sand from his throat. 

No--not sand. Tiny crystals of something that burned his tongue and leeched the moisture from his mouth. When he shifted his weight, he could feel the same substance crunching and rolling beneath him, white and dry and smelling of metal. Salt.

He turned on his stomach and managed to prop himself up with shaking arms. Salt cascaded off of his back and shoulders, dug into the heels of his hands as he balanced his weight on them. He pulled his knees up; his toes dragged ruts in the salt and he realized he was naked, his pale skin rough with white dust. 

Slowly, carefully, he lifted one hand and pressed it against his ribs where Delita’s blade had bitten in. His fingertips found again the edge of the wound, the skin dry and rubbery. Lips parted, breath still, he pressed his finger into it. The flesh inside yielded easily to him and he shivered, closing his eyes. 

Finally he encountered something soft and sticky, the texture like jam left out on the table past lunchtime. When he withdrew his fingers and held them up to the light, his fingernails were outlined in brown, a soft chunk of something trapped between his knuckles. Rolling it between finger and thumb, it had a strange satiny texture, familiar and foreign at the same time.

“Did you think, after how loyally you’d served me, that I would allow you to be taken so easily?”

Argath’s head jerked up. The room was lit by a handful of stubby candles dribbling wax down the corners of the box he’d been laying in--a coffin, he realized belatedly--but he did not need to see the slender frame, the fall of silver hair to know who stood in the darkness beyond the pool of light the candles made. 

“Your Grace,” Argath tried to say, but his voice rasped to shreds in a too-dry throat, and he doubled over in another coughing fit. He could feel something moving inside of him, something soft. Something wrong.

Elmdore stepped forward, coming just to the edge of the light. “This would have been easier had you been simply left to lay in the snow,” he said, “but the fire from the Keep warmed you, and you had been buried by rubble when Celia and Lettie came to collect you.”

Argath touched the wound in his side again, questioningly. 

“Yes, you fell. But you rise again to serve me, and where once beat a living heart there is now a greater force: vengeance. It will see those who have wronged you fall before you, and be crushed under your feet.”

“Ramza,” Argath croaked. Something had bubbled up out of him to moisten his throat enough to talk. “Lives?”

“And will come here seeking his sister, ere long. By the time he arrives, you will be ready to face him.” Elmdore retreated once more into the darkness. “My power will burn you clean; come to me when it is done.”

Alone again, Argath wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, leaving a sticky brown smear. He could feel the force Elmdore had spoken of: a slow pulsing in his veins, a heat in his chest. 

He would face Ramza again. Ramza the hypocrite, Ramza the traitor, with his soft hands and soft words and soft ways. He had called Argath friend while it suited him and then turned his back on him to go running after that commoner. 

Ramza, who had laughed and kissed so easily, whose touch against Argath’s bare skin was the first he’d known in years, whose golden hair, unbound, had been like silk between Argath’s trembling fingers.

Ramza, who had left him bleeding in the snow. 

Argath heaved, hunching down like a sick dog. He clamped a hand over his mouth, but fluid oozed from between his fingers and down his forearm, dripping off of the point of his elbow. The next involuntary jerk of his body brought up a brownish mass that landed with a soft _plop_ in his bed of salt. He gagged, reaching into his throat, and seized upon the end of something. It was long in coming out of him, kinks and coils of it spilling out and out, white and bulging in places, slick and sinewy in others. 

_”My power will burn you clean.”_

He could feel the heat rising in him, searing his insides and boiling away the weak, worthless thing that had once worn this skin. The pain was his strength, his power gifted to him by the gods and by his beloved Marquis. What had been a dull slug of iron was now being forged into a bright blade, to be wielded by the most skilled of swordsmen. 

He would face Ramza again, and he would see justice done. 

“Guests! Guests come to Limberry!”

**Author's Note:**

> I just like writing sad Argath stories.
> 
> If you like my work and want to find out how to support me, check out jaydeefaire.carrd.co. There’s a rad new link there!


End file.
